But, but, how will Verizon survive the coming Exaflood or something if we don't give them that spectrum? Do you all want civilization to collapse under the sheer weight of twitpics because we failed to provide sufficient subsidies?

In practice, it's close enough to 2.4GHz that the frequency alone won't make much difference in range, and capacity is a function of bandwidth, not frequency. Antennas will be able to be a bit smaller, and power requirements will go down a tad. In fact, there is already a chunk of ~5GHz spectrum allocated to wifi in the US, so this will likely just be an extension of that.

As if a company would ever provide a firmware update when they can sell you a new router.

Solution: Buy routers which you can flash over the vendor firmware with DD-WRT / OpenWRT / Tomato or some other open-source firmware. Although that applies to the router CPU (usually a Broadcom derivative) and not necessarily the radio firmware.

However, sometimes the radio firmware is open-sourced (rarely by the vendor, usually reverse-engineered). If not, even the boxed binary radio firmware can often be tweaked in ways not intended by the vendor, without having to reverse-engineer the whole firmware.

If anyone can solve this for routers that actually have the hardware capability for another channel, it will be the DD-WRT people.